I Have Decided to Follow Jesus
Sea of Galilee
This is an arrangement of a popular hymn that Bonnie and I wrote for an offertory during Epiphany, 2010 (click here for the sermon that it followed). I didn’t know beforehand, but the melody is a Hindustani folk tune from India. The passage for the Sunday was Luke 5 where Jesus calls his disciples to follow him.
We added a verse in the relative minor to echo Jesus’ words in verse 4, “Put out into the deep…”Just as the Lord called Peter into the deep to catch fish, he sends his church today into the world to bring others to him. May we, like Peter, leave everything to follow him and may the catch be astonishing!
We played it on guitar with kind of a folky back-beat feel. Our friend Robb Robins played it with us on accordion to add some sustain chords and also tag the melody lick in between things.
Sing Praise to the Father
This is a new melody for the wonderfully Trinitarian hymn text “Sing Praise to the Father” by Margaret Clarkson. Steve Williamson, the worship pastor at Resurrection and I wrote this together on a slow morning in the summer a few years ago. I like the way it keeps a few signature melodic and harmonic motives from the most common hymn tune, “To God Be the Glory” by Wlliam H. Doane.
The recording is of Steve leading this on a Sunday morning at Resurrection a few years ago.
Lyrics
Lead Sheet
Chart
Immanuel’s Land
When I was in high school, a colleague of my Pastor’s passed away and left behind an enormous library—something like 10,000 volumes. My Pastor enlisted the help of a few of the guys in the youth group to help him transport the books from the widow’s house to Master’s Seminary where they would become part of their collection.
Incidentally, the Dean of Master’s Seminary, John MacArthur sent a semi-truck on loan from one of his parishioners, a high up mucky-muck in the Hershey chocolate company. For hours we loaded books onto this truck while smelling the sweet aromas of our favorite chocolate bars. Anyway, in thanks for our help, we were each allowed to keep one book. My choice? A little black, leather-bound edition of The Christian Book of Mystic Verse compiled by A.W. Tozer. Inside the pages of this collection, along with many other deeply formative texts, I discovered Ann Cousin’s Immanuel’s Land. It contains nineteen stanzas and is truly a worthwhile journey to read them all.
I set several of the poems in this little black bound book that still sits on my shelf and whose cover is now barely hanging on. This continues to be one of the favorite melodies I have ever written. The recording is from our album Sleep Easy which you can purchase here.
Holy, Holy, Holy
This is another great hymn that has been arranged in many ways. As is the case with many hymns whose most popular harmonization is for SATB, the harmonic pace can be too swift for a band to play without the arrangement sounding choppy and disjointed. I tried to slow the harmony down in this arrangement by simplifying some of the changes and harmonies to work with more of a guitar feel. Personally, I love and probably prefer to sing this hymn with standard 4-part arrangement, but this feel adds some variety to a classic hymn. As is my custom, I added an interlude based on the melodic material of the 4th stanza. I recommend doing the interlude at the beginning, ending, and in between verses 2 and 3.
Heard You Were A King (Come Thou Long Expected Jesus)
This song appears on our EP “In Wilderness and Glory.”
Download the entire EP for free here.
This is a re-imagining of the Hymn, Come Thou Long Expected Jesus that I wrote for Advent, 2007. The musical form uses a repetitive ground bass figure in the piano that gives a sense of stasis that is apt for a song and season of waiting for Christ to come. When it reaches the section with the lyrics, “heard you were a king” this pattern and the rhythm of the songs comes to an abrupt break.
In the midst of our waiting, we hear the news of a coming king whose presence will change the things in our life that we so desperately need changed—the violence outside of us in the streets and more profoundly, the violence within our own hearts.
In a culture that refuses to wait for anything, even Christmas as we feast on the season nearly before thanksgiving, and in a culture that substitutes the presence of things—like material gifts and presents—for the presents of people—our families, friends, and God—Jesus’ coming is a reminder that we need his advent in our hearts and lives every day of the year. God with us in the person of Jesus, our Immanuel, is the true gift that has the power to change.
Come Thou Fount
This is another one of those hymns that has such a timeless melody and contour along with painfully honest lyrics that it has been arranged effectively in a number of different ways in a number of different traditions. Like my arrangement for Be Thou My Vision, I constructed a melodic interlude to add some extra space between the strophic verses. I took the first phrase of the third stanza and then transposed down a sixth to echo the original. When I lead this, I give each phrase to a different instrument to emphasize the parallelism in different colors. My favorite combination is an electric guitar with some reverb and delay on the first line in a higher register and then piano in octaves on the second line.
I also altered the harmonic structured, putting it in the relative minor and giving it a really repetitive ground bass that has a minimalist sort of feel. This lets the band create a really thick and ambient groove that allows the melody to soar above the arrangement.
Also similar to the Be Thou My Vision arrangement, I’ve added some more space in a bridge section that repeats, “Here’s my heart Lord.” For me, this is the central thought of this song; that the life of faith is one of constant confession that we are not strong enough on our own. We admit that we are prone to wander, not just in our salvation, but in our sanctification as well. We confess that despite our love for God, we do what we don’t want to do (Rom 7) and turn our backs like the prodigal son and leave the father. The journey of faith is a continual giving of ourselves back to God, for it is only him that can put his seal upon us—the seal of our baptism into the father son and holy spirit. This is such a baptismal hymn for me. The fount is one of living water that cleanses and restores.
At the end of the bridge, the arrangement transitions to a reharminization of the first verse with a pedal on D. Our response to God’s forgiveness and incorpartion into his body in baptism is always praise. It is God who seals us and it is He who teaches us to sing. It is the beginning and end of a song about wandering. We do not end without hope, but in the joy of the fount, drowning in the forgiveness and redeeming love of a God we—though we wander—sees us afar off and runs to us to receive us back.
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